


Desperate Times Call

by MxAlex



Series: The Gracious Gang of Gotham [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - No Capes, Gen, Kid Fic, Minor Character Death, Trauma, tGGoG'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-23 05:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6106039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MxAlex/pseuds/MxAlex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce Wayne has lost everything and not that much all at once. A brief look at the time that comes after.</p><hr/><p><strong>Age/Fusion/No Capes AU:</strong> Growing up half on the streets, Bruce Wayne and Kate Kane find themselves collecting angry orphans, dysfunctional survivors, snarky juvenile delinquents and reckless teenagers to build their suffering city a motley militia team of penniless but clever and dedicated vigilantes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desperate Times Call

**Author's Note:**

> **Series Notes:** this is an episode in a longer series - you will need to read the other stories for this to make sense. If you wish to subscribe, do so on the [series page](http://archiveofourown.org/series/413683) instead of on this story, as each episode is posted as a new work in the series, instead of as a new chapter.
> 
>  **Story Notes:** thank you to [Zappy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Zappy) and [Twisted_Magic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Twisted_Magic/) for beta help!
> 
>  **Warnings:** off-scene minor character death, some minor emotional and physical trauma.

Here is a fact.

Time is an abstract concept used to interpret and focus on a single event among infinite simultaneous happenings. It does not exist beyond its use as a false unit of measure and when it comes to all the worlds, in all the times, in all the possibilities, it is so significant and insignificant all at once that it is nearly useless.

Here is the truth.

Time eats. It takes and it hurts and it destroys all that once was.

* * *

It looks a little something like this.

It’s fifteen years before the hammer falls, as it were. Bruce opens his mouth to ask _please let me live_ but what comes out is more like this;

“I’m perfectly alright,” he answers, eight years old on two days without sleep, fire on his mind, blood on his hands, pain in his bones, heartbreak in his chest and more teeth than smile colouring his face. “Why do you ask?”

It’s November 12th, 1982, a Friday. He has only one question.

_What happens when the end comes, and you just keep breathing?_

* * *

Here is what the hammer fall looks like;

August 24th, 1997 is a Sunday. The air is warm, but the breeze off the ocean is sweet and cool on bare skin. In a single moment on a half-forgotten backstreet, there is a freeze of silence in which even the birds are silent, not even the sound of a car in the distance.

Then the world _shatters_ , swallowing brick and glass in a blaze of fire and sound, roaring for the devil, the reaper, Death itself to take and take and _take_.

Jason Todd is twenty-one years old and for eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds, he looks Death, the reaper, the devil and his own demons in the eye and speaks-weeps-prays _not today, not today_.

For eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds, he lays on cracked pavement, water soaked, smoke clouding his lungs, heat wrecking his skin, and there is not a whisper of breath between his blood-stained teeth.

Bruce Wayne cracks nine of his brother-friend-soldier’s twelve ribs and sobs gulps of air past lips beginning to turn blue trying to raise the dead. He is rewarded eight minutes, thirty-eight seconds later with a small flutter of ash-stained lungs and a fragile heart waking back up.

The devil, the reaper, Death, his demons and Jason bow to the will of Gotham and agree _not today_. They choose not to speak of what they may have seen or heard between the long pause of heartbeats.

By the time there is a hospital chart marked _Jason Todd_ , the city will be calling the preceding thirty-one hours _The Last Weekend_.

They are not speaking of his death.

* * *

Bruce Wayne kneels on the floor of Leslie Thompkins’ clinic on November 12th, 1982. It’s fifteen years before nine broken ribs, and the bodies of Bruce’s parents were taken away fifteen minutes ago.

Here is what he knows; it has taken forty-six days for his life to end.

Someone is saying-whispering-yelling that everything will be okay. His aunt and uncle are coming, the police are here, _everything will be okay_.

At eight years old, Bruce has and hasn’t lost everything all at once; most of all, he is young and frightened and now the world has broken in a way that can never be repaired.

There is a deep, dark, feral part of him that wants to bolt out the door and never look back. It is a childish, ugly part of him that thinks he can run from the blood on his hands.

He does not know what stops him from doing so.

Bruce is eight years old when he picks up a blood-stained pearl that was digging into his knee and begins to collect the rest, running his hands across dirty tile to find the smallest pieces of his mother’s necklace. He has gotten five - all crusted in red and black - when his cousin Kate drops to the floor beside him - white as a sheet with tear-filled eyes - and begins to help him.

This is how he spends his first night as an orphan; on his knees, silently begging and praying for some miracle that won’t come and trying to fix the only thing left of his old life.

It won’t be the last time he does something like that.

* * *

If time does not exist, then it goes without saying that it is not linear.

All that ever has been and everything that ever will be is happening at once. Calendars are merely diaries of experiences already witnessed and dates are the coordinates to the event in question. It is numbers and physics and feeling and something more or less, nobody knows for sure.

The first and only son of Wayne knows this; almost all are bound so tightly by their illusions of time that they are never capable of looking anywhere but at their own feet while they head down the road of fate. _Life_ is a set track, and most will only deviate by going down a branch from the path when a choice appears. Time, in this instance, is ahead, but also behind and beside and all around. If one only looks at their current steps, they will only see their present - everything behind is but memory and everything ahead merely speculation.

Some are able to glance ahead for a moment - they will see the future, or glimpse a past they did not appear in. They could look to the side and see what is happening for others, or of what could have been, if they’d taken a different path.

Very, very few can step off the track entirely, and fewer still can get back to their last spot once they do so. The son of Wayne, the second who proceeded the first - but that is neither here nor now - is not one capable of doing this, though he could manage it if he asked.

It is fifteen years before his birth and his parents are okay, and it’s fifteen years after and the world is thinking of burning. He can see what has come and what can be and that which did not happen but almost did.

But it doesn’t matter right now.

* * *

This is what Katherine Kane knows.

Her past is made of rich fabric and tight stitches, so rigid she could not breathe, so small that one day she would have burst forth and destroyed it all if it hadn’t changed.

Her present is painful, dark and frightening. She has never been one for fear and horror, has never appreciated a scary story or a spooky night-bathed hallway. She is not one for desperation or panic. She may love a good thrill, but she prefers it to be an ordinary one.

Her future is set, but she doesn’t see that yet.

Now here is what Kate is made of.

She is destiny and fate woven into sharp lines and cold bones. Nothing is out of place and Gotham sees that it stays that way. There is not a nail on her fingers not a hair on her head that is meant to be elsewhere, but it doesn’t change the fact that here _hurts_.

She is love and protection, strong walls and a stronger spirit. She is not inheritably kind, or soft, but she is capable of both if the need arises. She is the right words at the right moment and the type of girl your parents warned you about. She’s drunk for the first time at age fourteen and a lover by fifteen, a commander come sixteen and a killer on seventeen.

She knows Gotham as loneliness and quiet nights that drag on for weeks. She knows Gotham as blood spilled and bones broken and hope both destroyed and restored.

She spends the 12th of November, 1982 on the floor of Leslie Thompkins’ clinic, picking up pearls and wishing she could pick up the pieces of her cousin’s heart just as easy.

She spends the 24th of August, 1997 on the floor of a restaurant, glass in her bright red hair, laughing like it’s going out of style and realizing how easy it is to break something into a thousand parts.

She spends every night of her life, from age eight onward, wondering if she’ll still be alive by the end of the month, the end of the week or tomorrow evening. She spends every day of the rest of her life as the first and last defense for too many and too few of her people.

Kate is loved and abandoned and hurt and alright and maybe a few other things.

But that’s another story.

* * *

Gotham, in a singular form; it’s the place for when there is nothing left.

Gotham, a bit more complicated; it is a feeling of desperation, tinged with despair and hopelessness.

It is not the end of the line. It is not that lonely place where people go to die.

It is the place you go to lick your wounds, it is the new start from a best-forgotten past. It is no other options, no place left to go.

It is a place of moving forward, the bottom of the pit from which one may climb out of - if all goes well, it is a place of healing.

But even the most tranquil pool can be befouled and even the most beautifully designed systems can be broken.

* * *

But in all truths, this story starts on the 27th of September, 1982.

It’s a Monday.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back (or trying to be) and I'm currently working on a large series - the next part should be posted around the end of the month, though I may post some other stuff in-between. Hope you like it, this one's going to be interesting.


End file.
